Robert Coover - Public Burning

“So I asked the third one, ‘Well, what about you, honey?’ And she says, ‘Well, mine was just like Harry Truman, Daddy. He wanted out before he’d ever got in, then when he did get in, he didn’t know what to do there. Finally, he just rolled over and quit, and when I asked him why, he says: “Lady, the fuck stops here!”’ Haw haw haw!”

Well, at least it wasn’t about me, I thought. My shoe seemed to be caught under the front seat. Shoestring snagged or something. As I twisted it back and forth, trying to get it free, it suddenly came to me that the roller coaster in my dream last night had not been a roller coaster at all, but one of those rides they call an Octopus, and it had had a sign on it that said MOSAIC OF HISTORY. Funny how dreams kept developing after you’d dreamt them… I seemed to remember that little Ethel was wearing an “A” on her chest, too. And that she looked a lot like my first girlfriend back in Whittier. Maybe because of Sheriff Street…my girlfriend’s old man was the local chief of police…

The cabbie, leaning on the horn, hulled his way around a bus, through an onrush of latecomers pouring over from the Hill, and suddenly we were free, shooting up toward the old Willard Hotel. “Hey, pal!” he shouted back over his shoulder: “Am I steppin’? Am I steppin’?”

I let myself smile. I wondered if I was going to have to take my foot out to get the shoe free.

“Say, I heard a good one about the Vice President,” he shouted back.

“What—!?”

“Back in the war, see, when he was tryin’ to dodge the draft, he went to work for the OPA. And while he was there, he picked up this chick and took her out by the old quarry and parked with her. He says, ‘I hope ya don’t mind if we park here a little while — it’s okay, cuz I am Dick Nixon of the OPA!’ And she says, ‘Well, I don’t usually do this sorta thing, but I guess it’s all right, so long as you’re Dick Nixon of the OPA…!’”

“Uh, listen…”

“So he puts his arm around her, see, and he says, ‘I hope ya don’t mind my puttin’ my arm around ya like this, it’s really okay, on accounta I am Dick Nixon of the OPA!’ And she says, ‘Well, I usually don’t allow—’”

“Yeah, listen, I’ve heard that—”

“Wait a minute! It gets better! He puts his other hand on her knee, see, and—”

“ I said I’ve heard it! ” God, I hated this small talk. “ Don’t you know who I am? ”

“All right, all right, don’t get sore! Just tryin’ to cheer ya up. Jesus…!” He was grimacing at me through the rear-view mirror, not watching the street. There were people wandering back and forth in our path and I was afraid he was going to kill somebody. Mrs. Fillmore, I remembered, died in the Willard Hotel. Uncle Sam was through with her by then, though.

Suddenly, the cabbie spotted a pair of copulating dogs in the street—“ Whoopee! ” he cried, took aim, and roared forward. I was thrown back, anchored by my stuck foot, into the hard rusty springs of the old ruptured rear seat. The cab had no shocks left at all. It was like a jeep ride I’d had through a shelling near Bougainville, only the jeep had been in better condition. The dogs saw us coming, wound about frantically trying to get separated, finally lurched in a six-footed panic across the wide avenue toward the distant curb, hopelessly hung up on each other. I noticed, as the cabdriver, yowling like a wild Indian, reeled cross-traffic after the dogs, that we were near the FBI building, and I hoped I wouldn’t be recognized.

I cried out something, I don’t remember what, didn’t matter, I couldn’t even hear myself over the cabbie’s hallooing. I was hanging onto the door with one hand, the seat with the other, and I saw as I glanced up at the rear-view mirror that I was grinning madly. Oddly, the cabdriver was looking back at me, not out at the street. Buses and automobiles swung in and out of our path like the crazy cars in the old Keystone Kops movies, the dogs blundering through the screeching wheels, yelping with pain and dismay, scrambling miserably for a foothold. Some people ride in taxis all the time. They say they like it. They like to make contact with the man in the street, they say. They must be crazy.

We were closing in on the dogs. The one on top was half twisted away now, both front paws down on the pavement to one side of the bottom dog, but his left hind leg stuck straight up in the air. They seemed to be trying to go in two different directions, and each time the top dog kicked, the bottom dog’s back legs splayed out. I watched aghast as we bore down on them. I no longer even knew which direction we were headed. I was afraid I might get carsick. We crossed paths with a trolleybus, sideswiped an open police car, and caught the dogs just as they reached the curb, clipping the top one in the butt and sending them both skidding, still locked up, spraddle-legged and yipping wildly, right into the doorway of the National Theater. Closed, I saw. Guys and Dolls coming June 29. Cast Intact. Interrupting Its Sensational New York Run. “ Goal! ” the cabbie cried.

The cab had spun sharply and stopped dead. I sat back in a cold sweat. I was too weak to open the door and get out. “ Hoo-eee! ” the driver crowed happily, leaning back over the seat and slapping me on the leg. “That’s one piece o’ ass them old houndawgs won’t soon fergit!” I winced at the contact. I’m no shrinking violet, I’m a political animal, after all, I know what it is to be down in the arena — but I can’t go out and grab people and hug them and carry on, and I don’t like them grabbing me. Especially on the leg. It doesn’t come natural to me to be a buddy-buddy boy, with cabdrivers least of all. He winked and squeezed my knee. Reflexively, I jerked my foot right out of its trapped shoe. “Yeah, I know who ya are, Nick,” he said.

“Nick…?” I squeaked. Nobody had called me that in eight or nine years. Not since the Navy, the South Pacific…

“Green Island, remember?” he grinned. He turned back to restart the motor. “I guess it’s Commander Nick now, ain’t it? Haw haw! Just read about your promotion!”

I stared numbly at him in the mirror, trying to place him. Some guy I’d cleaned out in a poker game out there? Was that it, had he been lying in wait for me all these years? I tried, feebly, to smile. “Do I, uh…?”

He pushed his way brusquely back through oncoming traffic to the right side of the road. “Ho ho, Nixon’s by God Hamburger Stand, remember that? You sure had it made out there, Nick! Green fuckin’ Island, no shit — you musta hated to see the war end!”

“What do you mean?” There was a tightness in my chest. I felt a little like that guy wrestling a horse in front of the Archives Building we’d just passed. “It wasn’t…there wasn’t—”

“Everything from cunts and whiskey to captured Jap rifles, cupcakes and influence, you spread an amazin’ menu, Nick! A livin’ legend! They say ya socked away a cool hunderd grand on that tour!”

“Ten thousand, that’s all,” I protested, but he seemed to laugh harder than ever at this. “Besides, that…that was from poker.”

“Sure it was, Nick! Sure it was! Haw haw! And where’d all that famous chopped meat come from you was boondogglin’? Most of it was headed for those poor dumb cocksuckers out to sea and off in the battle zones, wasn’t it, Nick? Booze for the enlisted goddamn men, am I right? Eh, Commander?”

“Well, if I hadn’t…somebody else…”

“Haw haw! Right! I believe you, Nick! I’m with ya! The only fuckin’ goddamn legitimate American hero in the war , Nick, I mean that! Hairy Dick, the Hamburger King a the South Pacific! The Big Bug a Green Island, the Sultan of SCAT — they shoulda give you a medal , Nick!”